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As LinkedIn closes its Events app, social conference service Lanyrd steps in with new integration

LinkedIn recently announced that it would be closing its Events app as of today. Timed to perfection, Lanyrd, the conference-focused social service, has now launched LinkedIn integration in a bid to replace the feature, which was a popular way of promoting business conferences.

Lanyrd’s Twitter integration has been core to its feature set since the service launched in January 2011, using your social graph there to recommend events you may like to attend. From today, users will additionally be able to sign in with their LinkedIn accounts for the same functionality. Given that most people have a more strictly ‘professional’ set of contacts on LinkedIn, it should make the event recommendations more tightly relevant to their jobs.

The move, and its timing, is a smart one for UK-based Lanyrd (not to be confused with ‘gig-goers scrapbook’ app Lanyard, which we covered last week). It already boasts more than 25,000 events submitted by users in over 100 countries based solely on Twitter integration. Inviting LinkedIn’s user base to the party as they lose their in-built alternative could expand the service’s usefulness significantly.

Lanyrd’s closest competitors are the likes of Eventbrite and the recently relaunched Plancast, although Lanyrd sets itself apart by acting as much as a speaker directory as it is an events guide. Event organisers are encouraged to add the Twitter (or now LinkedIn) profiles of each speaker, and users can click through to see where else each one is appearing. There’s even a browser extension to see where Twitter users are speaking, right from their profiles.

Martin Bryant was Editor-at-Large at The Next Web. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new. You can find him on Twitter, on Snapchat as Martinsfp, subscribe to him on Facebook and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.